Workshop "Common Issues and Situated Knowledge in Post-Western Sociology. The Case of Eastern Europe and China"

Workshop organized by Laurence Roulleau-Berger, Research Director Emeritus at CNRS, Triangle, ENS Lyon, and Svetla Koleva, Professor, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Science, 2024-25 Fellow at Collegium of Lyon.
 

Program

9:30 am – 9:50 am: Welcome address and introduction by

Laurence Roulleau-Berger, Research Director Emeritus at CNRS, Triangle UMR 5206, ENS Lyon

Svetla Koleva, Professor, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow 2024-2025, Collegium de Lyon

9:50 am – 10:30 am: Marek Skovajsa, Charles University in Prague, Czechia, One among many in the world: I. A. Bláha’s project of Czech sociology and its international contexts

10:30 am – 11:00 am: Discussion

11:00 am – 11:40 am: Sun Feiyu, Beijing University, China, From Western Learning Study to Comparative Study of Civilization: An Internal Logic of Su Guoxun’s Social Theory

11:40 am – 12:10 am: Discussion

12:10 am – 1:30 pm: Lunch

1:30 pm – 2:10 pm: Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi, Romania, Dimitrie Gusti, his seminal work in Romanian sociology, his ‘monographic school’ and his heirs. Problematic recognition

2:10 pm – 2:40 pm: Discussion

2:40 pm – 3:20 pm: Laurence Roulleau-Berger, CNRS, Triangle, ENS Lyon, Post-Western Theory, Heritages and Autonomous Knowledge in Chinese Sociology

3:20 pm – 4:10 pm: Discussion

4:10 pm – 4:30 pm: Coffee break

4:30 pm – 5:10 pm: Svetla Koleva, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences/Collegium de Lyon, How can Ivan Hadjiiski be read today?

5:10 pm – 5:40 pm: Discussion

5:40 pm – 6:00 pm: Closing (round of speakers)

 Triangle laboratory website
 

Speakers

GHEORGHIU Mihai Dinu, professor emeritus at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi, Romania since 2019, editor-in-chief of the Romanian journal Psihologia Sociala since 2012 and coordinator of the OBSERVATORUL SOCIAL collection (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Publishing, Iaşi) since 2010. After obtaining his doctorate (Les métamorphoses de l’agit-prop. Les institutions de contrôle des intellectuels par les partis communistes et leurs transformations après 1989 : le cas des écoles de parti) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris under the supervision of Pierre Bourdieu in 1997, he worked in France (Centre de Sociologie Européenne/Centre Européen de Sociologie et Sciences Politiques/CESSP-EHESS, CNRS, Collège de France; Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi et du Travail/CEET, CNAM) and Romania (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi). He is the author and co-author of several books and around a hundred articles in the fields of sociology of education, sociology of work, sociology of literature, comparative studies of elites and student migration in Romanian, French and English. Among the most important works are Itinéraires des élites africaines dans le monde. Réseaux et transferts entre diasporas et « petites sociétés », Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Simona Corlan-Ioan, Abel Kouvouama (éditeurs), Iași, Editura Universității Alexandru Ioan Cuza, 2022 ; Les sciences sociales et leurs publics. Engagements et distanciations, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Paul Arnault, (éditeurs), Iași, Editura Universității Alexandru Ioan Cuza, 2013 ; L’hôpital en mouvement. Changements organisationnels et conditions de travail, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Frédéric Moatty, Paris, Editions Liaisons sociales, 2013 (Romanian translation, Spitalul în miscare, Iași, Polirom, 2017) ; La mobilité des élites : reconversions et circulation internationale. Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu (éd.), Iași, Editions UAIC, 2012 ; Education et frontières sociales. Un grand bricolage, directeur de l’ouvrage, Monique de Saint Martin, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Paris, Editions Michalon, 2010, (Romanian translation, Educatie și frontiere sociale. Franta, România, Brazilia, Suedia, Iași, Polirom, 2011).

KOLEVA Svetla, DSc, is a professor of sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, an editor-in-chief of the academic journal Sociological Problems (Bulgaria), member of the General Assembly of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, of the Scientific Councils of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology – Sofia, of the Institute for Advanced Study – Nantes, of the MSH Paris-Saclay. Her main fields of research are history of sociology, sociology of knowledge, epistemology of social sciences, political sociology, and sociology of education. Her project at Collegium de Lyon Non-hegemonic theory and post-Western spaces of scientific knowledge production: the case of Central and Eastern European Sociologi is as part of the collaborative program Non-Hegemonic Theory and Post-Western Sociology between Asia and Europe led by Laurence Roulleau-Berger (Research Director Emeritus at CNRS, Triangle UMR 5206, ENS Lyon).

ROULLEAU-BERGER Laurence is Research Director Emeritus at CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research), Triangle, Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon, Triangle, PhD Supervisor in sociology (2001), French Director of the International Advanced Laboratory CNRS/ENS Lyon-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Post-Western Sociology in Europe and in China. She has led numerous research programs in Europe and in China in urban sociology, economic sociology, and sociology of migration over thirty years. Since 2006, she is involved in an epistemological way on the fabric of post-Western sociology. She has published numerous articles, chapters and books among the most recent: Post-Western Revolution in Sociology. From China to Europe, Brill, (2016); Work and Migration. Chinese Youth in Shanghai and Paris, with Yan Jun, L’Aube, (2017); The Fabric of Sociological Knowledge, co-ed. with Xie Lizhong, Peking University Press (2017) (in Chinese); Post-Western Sociology. From China to Europe, co-edited with Li Peilin, Routledge (2018); Young Chinese Migrants, Compressed Individual and Global Condition, Brill (2021); Sociology of Migration and Post-Western Theory, co-edited with Liu Yuzhao, ENS Publishers (2022); Sociology of Chinese Youth, with Su Liang, Brill, 2022; co-edit with Li Peilin, Kim Seung-Kuk, Shujiro Yazawa, Handbook of Post-Western Sociology. From East Asia to Europe, Brill Publishers (2023). She is Editor-in-Chief of the Brill’s Series Post-Western Sociology and Global Knowledge, and co-Editor in chief of ENS Publishers Series De l’Orient à l’Occident. She was distinguished Professor Shanghai University High-End Foreign Expert Program, she is Life Fellow in Global China Academy, British Academy. Among awards, in 2021, she has got the Medal of Chevalière de l’Ordre National du Mérite.

SKOVAJSA Marek teaches sociology at the Faculty of Arts othe Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, Czechia. His main research interests are sociological theory, cultural sociology and the history of sociology. He is a member of the editorial team of Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review. Among his publications are Sociology in the Czech Republic (with Jan Balon, Palgrave Pivot 2017) and “Continuity in discontinuity: The recurrent motif of cultural autonomy in the development of Czech sociology of culture” (Cultural Sociology, 2021).

SUN Feiyu is a professor of Sociology in Peking University, China and he is also the Vice dean of Yuanpei college. He did his BA and MA in PKU, both from Sociology Department and his PhD in the program of Social and Political Thought from York University at Toronto, Canada. Feiyu Sun mainly does psychoanalytical sociology and phenomenological sociology, but he does research of social theory from the perspective of Eastern-Western comparative studies, mostly based on theoretical studies and sometimes based on empirical studies. His publications include Social Suffering and Political Confession: Such in Modern China (2013); Methodology and Life World: Four Studies on and from Alfred Schutz (2018). And his latest book is: From Seele to Mind: A Sociological Study of the Transformation of Classical Psychoanalysis.

Abstracts

Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu: Dimitrie Gusti, his seminal work in Romanian sociology, his ‘monographic school’ and his heirs. Problematic recognition

Dimitrie Gusti (Iasi 1880–Bucharest 1955) is undoubtedly the best-known Romanian sociologist, for his scientific work, for having made sociology a "science of the nation", for his ability to mobilize young students in field studies, for his academic career and for his public recognition. A university Professor from 1910, member of the Romanian Academy in 1919 and its President (1944–1946), Minister of National Education (1932–1933), he also founded the Romanian Social Institute (1921) and the Village Museum in Bucharest (1936), which today bears his name. He was also editor of two of Romania's leading social science journals, Arhiva pentru știința și reforma socială (1919–1943), and Sociologie românească (1936–1944). The international recognition he gained in the 1930s (member of several foreign academies, Grand Officer of the Légion d’Honneur, 1935) was to culminate in the organization of the XIVth International Congress of Sociology in Bucharest in August 1939, an event that was cancelled on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War. Gusti’s decline after the war as a leading public intellectual was to accompany the dismantling of the institutional network he had founded and supported, as well as his teaching of sociology. His rehabilitation some ten years after his death gradually raised the question of his legacy and the struggles between heirs to appropriate the symbolic capital associated with him. Taking into account the different perspectives of these recent and competing histories of Romanian sociology and the divergent trajectories of the main students of the ‘Gusti school’ allows us to reflect on what social science represents today in Romania.

Svetla Koleva: How can Ivan Hadjiiski be read today?

Ivan Hadjiski (1907–1944) was the Bulgarian freethinker of the 1930s and 1940s whom all the social sciences and humanities in Bulgaria claim as their predecessor. So how can we talk about Ivan Hadjiiski without making him conform to the codified and standardized language of contemporary science and reducing him to a single facet of his intellectual universe? However, he will be presented here as a sociologist whose work continues “the event that creates a difference” (Isabelle Stengers) in the Bulgarian intellectual space between the wars. How can one explain the fact that a lawyer by training, in a context where sociology is still embryonic, and in its infancy, writes works that stand out for their sociological content? An attempt to reconstruct Hadjiiski’s intellectual approach will reveal his sociological particularity, which consists in the following: What makes Hadjiiski’s approach different from that of his contemporaries at the national-local-epistemic level is at the same time what, from the point of view of scientific epistemology, joins the space of a discipline within which his observations, theses and analyses become verifiable because the conditions of their production are explicit and demonstrable.

Laurence Roulleau-Berger: Post-Western Theory, Heritages and Autonomous Knowledge in Chinese Sociology

While Western social sciences have dominated modern social sciences for centuries, from the point of view of Chinese sociologists, Western social sciences are merely “situated knowledge” produced from the experiences of Western countries. The various modernization models of China and other non-Western countries call for the development of a post-Western sociology that is non-hegemonic, more inclusive and scientific, and endowed with stronger explanatory power. In China, the second decade of the 21st century has been characterized by the search for and exploration of new visions and sociological theories. Today, epistemic autonomies and local knowledge in Chinese sociology are being constructed as part of a process of sinicization of a Westernized East. For example, Sun Feiyu, from a perspective very similar to that of Fei Xiaotong on “cultural self-consciousness”, has contributed to the construction of the theory of subjectivity in Chinese sociology. Based on the Chinese experience, Yang Dian invented the notion of iconic concepts such as “another invisible hand”, “guanxi”, “property rights”, “the reformation of the working class”, “the trinity of urbanization”... produced in Chinese sociology over the last thirty years. A post-Western theory is produced in a dialogical perspective between spaces of knowledge in a new geography of a “new world” and new assemblages between « Western » et « non-Western » sociologies.Post-Western sociology is organized around common heritages, circulation, and hybridizations of sociological knowledge.

Marek Skovajsa: One among many in the world: I. A. Bláha’s project of Czech sociology and its international contexts

The subject of this presentation is Inocenc Arnošt Bláha (1879–1960), a central figure in Czech sociology in the period between the end of World War I and the arrival to power of the Communist party in 1948. Bláha was the founding Professor of sociology at the University of Brno, the chief editor of the journal Sociologická revue, a prolific writer and dedicated public educator. The group of his students and associates is commonly referred to as the Brno school of sociology.

Whereas Bláha’s role as institutional founder is widely recognized in the literature, his intellectual contributions are often unjustly overlooked. The key formative influences on his sociological thinking were the German human sciences, the French sociology of the early 20^th century (both Durkheimian and non-Durkheimian) and the American sociology of the 1920s and 1930s. But he saw himself mainly as cultivating a specifically Czech sociological approach, called “critical realism”, in the footsteps of the founder of Czech sociology Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Central to this approach was the aspiration to overcome the binaries of the Western sociological thought (between positivism and speculative philosophy, subjectivism and objectivism, psychologism and sociologism, theory and practice, etc.). Based on this foundation, Bláha developed ideas that were original contributions to general sociological theory. In the 1920s he elaborated his own version of functionalist theory which he labelled “federative functionalism”. In his studies of various social types, he explored the relationship between living conditions of various professional categories, their physical and mental habitus, and their lifestyle. The WWII and the Communist dictatorship after 1948 prevented him from fully developing and refining these ideas and from carrying to the end ambitious research projects in which they could have been tested against empirical data. The wide scope of his substantive interests is documented in his posthumously published opus magnum Sociology.

Bláha keenly followed the developments in German, French and American sociology, but he was no less interested in the work of sociologists from other European countries and other continents. As a self-conscious representative of a small sociological community he found of particular importance to maintain contacts with sociology in other small and mid-sized countries. The journal Sociologická revue regularly published large numbers of reviews of sociological literature from and on a wide range of societies to show the international variability and plurality of sociology.

Sun Feiyu: From Western Learning Study to Comparative Study of Civilization: An Internal Logic of Su Guoxun’s Social Theory

 Su Guoxun is a landmark figure in social theoretical research within China’s sociology community. His research career can be divided into two main phases. The first phase, which took place in the 1980s, and was epitomized by his work of Max Weber Rationalization and its Limitations, marked the true beginning of the study of Western social theories within China’s sociology circles and also represented the start of sociological contribution to China’s broader intellectual community. The second phase focused on the years between 2010 and 2020, during which Professor Su’s study, while still centered on Weberian studies, shifted its themes, perspectives and areas of inquiry towards a comparative study of Chinese and Western civilizations. This transition was underpinned by an internal logic that needs to be understood in the context of Professor Su’s own shift in understanding of the world and China around the turn of the millennium.